Friday, November 11, 2016

It's been hard to train two dogs at once. My old dog, Jack, never minded when I trained my young dog, Jenny. He was happy to chill out on the couch. But Jenny is different now that she's the old dog and Dash is the young dog: she wants to be part of whatever I'm doing, especially if it involves food. If I baby-gate her in another room while I train the puppy (and puppies take a lot of training) then she will sit right up against the gate and obsess. (Up side: gates have become much less scary to her recently, even though they are just as likely as they always were to fall down and go boom.) When I try to put her upstairs, she goes reluctantly and is ramped up and anxious when I let her out.

I read "A Secret to Training Two Dogs" by Eileen And Dogs, and determined that I would use mat training. I'd been told time and again that I should be mat training Jenny anyways: take the mat to the scary new place, and you have a safe haven for your shy dog. (Jenny is still extremely shy, though hugely improved from when I got her.)

I got a Mutt Matt for Dash and pulled a tiny old area rug out of storage for Jenny. Dash picked up the mat concept quickly: you lie down on it and get treats. In fact I now have trouble prying him off of it to put it away.

Dash on his mat.

But Jenny couldn't seem to do it. She eventually learned to lie down on her mat, but didn't like to stay on it. I tried asking them both to stay on their mats while I walked around them: Dash was glued to his, but Jenny would come off of hers and wander away.

This morning I unrolled Dash's mat and asked him to go to it, and Jenny went and hopped on the couch. The light bulb went off: this is my dog who refused to touch foot to ground unless absolutely necessary for the first months I had her. She lived on couches. I had to train her to get off of them. I used target practice with a yogurt lid that I moved farther and farther from the couch; she came up with the solution of picking the lid up and putting it back on the couch so she could keep getting rewarded without having to leave her safe space. The first time I saw her sleeping on the floor, four years after coming to live with me, I almost cried from joy. She even already has a "go to your couch" command which is quite strong.

Jenny training on her couch, shortly after she came to live with me.

So I trained Dash while she was on her couch, and then trained her while Dash was on his mat, and it was lovely. Both dogs were stuck in place until I asked them to get off. I was able to train something fun (a tunnel) working one dog at a time (with frequent treats thrown to the other).

The moral, as Denise Fenzi tells us in her excellent blog post, is to Train the Dog in Front of You. See what works for her, not what you think should work for all dogs.

Which leaves me to figure out how I will take a couch with me to the next strange place I need to bring Jenny...

About the Dog Zombie

Jessica Perry Hekman, DVM, PhD is fascinated by dog brains. She is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she studies the genetics of dog behavior. Her interests include the stress response in mammals, canine behavior, canine domestication, shelter medicine, animal welfare, and open access publishing. You may learn more about Jessica at www.dogzombie.com, or email her at jph at dogzombie dot com. All opinions expressed here are her own.

For the animal shall not be measured by man… They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. (Henry Beston)